Link: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/03/expelled.php

Read this story and then determine if there is any way that it is not highly amusing...

Link: http://www.navsource.org/archives/01/0161019.jpg

...of the USS Iowa moored in the sunset, covered with Christmas lights at NAS Norfolk, VA, in December 1984.

As a victim of bullying in high school, partly because I laboured under the clearly-naive delusion that school was a place where you went to acquire an education and learn stuff, the deja vu flooded over me when I read this article in the NYT about a high schooler being bullied in Fayetville AR. One of the more sinister developments is this one (which could not have happened in my high school period):

In ninth grade, a couple of the same boys started a Facebook page called “Every One That Hates Billy Wolfe.” It featured a photograph of Billy’s face superimposed over a likeness of Peter Pan, and provided this description of its purpose: “There is no reason anyone should like billy he’s a little bitch. And a homosexual that NO ONE LIKES.”

Delightful stuff.
Billy's parents are currently suing the school district, among others, over the treatment that their son has received. As is depressingly normal in these situations, the real scandal is not the bullying itself (there are always dysfunctional jerks in school, as in life), but the meek, incurious inaction by the school management, who seem (as ever) to live in a quaint world where bullying is a rite of passage, to be passively tolerated. This is professional negligence, and the school management and their leaders deserve to have their asses legally and fiscally kicked up the air. The only thing that is likely to cause a modification of behaviour is s righteous public slamming.

My sister is a co-owner of a restaurant in Polperro, Cornwall - The Pol Mary Restaurant. This is primarily a tourist restaurant. Needless to say, they get all types of customers, from the extremely nice and polite to the rude, demanding and obnoxious. However, this Yahoo exchange from yesterday with Cath revealed a new type of customer. For reference, "Peter" is one of the co-owners of the restaurant.
I was dying laughing reading this:

Cath: we had a dog eat part of a table last night
Cath: I guess he got bored
Cath: so next time you get a bit bored in a restaurant, eat a bit of the table
Cath: it’s obviously the done thing in the right circles
Graham: did you bill the customer for the bit of the table?
Cath: nope, we didn't notice until after he'd left the premises!
Cath: and found the heap of a zillion teak coloured bits
Cath: and realised the dowel had gone from the side of the table
Graham: name and shame!
Cath: didn't ask him name, but he was a nice black lab
Cath: Splodge was on table 1, but it wasn't him
Cath: or the little dogs on table 6
Cath: it was that black lab who had camped out under that table, table 7
Graham: hmm
Cath: you'd have thought his owners might have heard him munching the table
Cath: we gave him bikkits, he shouldn't have been hungry
Cath: maybe they thunk he'd brung a stick in with him
Cath: but the fact it was teak coloured might have been a pointer
Graham: this is bizarre...but also bizarrely funny
Cath: I guess he was fed up with waiting all night
Cath: so made his own arrangements re: inhouse entertainment
Cath: I guess he found the dowel on the floor and one thing led to another, and before he knew it, he'd munched it into a zillion bits
Cath: even duct tape no good for this
Cath: or furniture glue
Cath: Peter most disturbed
Cath: he got to make another one
Cath: before the table falls down
Cath: so we must only seat light people there
Cath: until it is reinforced
Cath: so we told Peter not to sit people there for lunch
Cath: just in case
Graham: what did they think that munching noise was then?
Cath: exactly
Cath: I can't believe they didn't hear it
Cath: we thought he must have eaten a stick, until we spotted it was once teak-coloured
Cath: and then noticed the piece of table missing
Cath: Peter looked at the bits and cried “That's a piece of my bloody table! The bastard has eaten my table!”
Cath: whoops
Cath: the first time we have had any dog damage
Cath: had people and kid damage before, but not doggy damage
Cath: normally it is busted glasses, forks gouged into table tops etc or stolen gear, not eaten tables
Cath: nobody ever ate a piece of table before
Cath: that's a new one
Cath: maybe he got worms
Cath: probably got woodworm now
Cath: tonight another black Lab wandered into the kitchen
Cath: and Peter screamed “Get out or we'll cook you!”

It gets better...this is a further story:

Cath: there was also the case of the picnic table being thrown across the terrace ....
Cath: by the irate punter who wanted just beer, and wouldn't take No for an answer.
Cath: We tried explaining that we weren't allowed to sell alcohol without a substantial meal
Cath: but he didn't believe us
Cath: and got irate about it, being the worse for wear to begin with
Cath: so he picked up one of the big tables on the terrace and hurled it at us
Cath: in disgust
Cath: alcohol was the last thing he actually needed, if you get my drift
Graham: did it hit anybody
Cath: so as well as dogs eating tables, we get humans hurling them.
Cath: we get people coming up with their dogs to claim their biscuits, because the sign says Dogs are Welcome, ask for a biscuit. They obviously don't feel obliged to frequent our humble abode, they just want the free bikkits.
Cath: One cheeky swine even asked if his dog could have a meal, as well as a biscuit?! He could have had a dinner, if his owner was having something to eat, but he wasn't!
Cath: We often do doggie dinners, but only if the human beings are eating with us.
Graham: It seems like there are some rather unscrupulous dog owners
Cath: There are limits.
Cath: We used to have two highchairs until a fat bastard sat on the tray on one of them and smashed it.
Cath: He just propped it back up and left, without owning up.
Cath: Then there was the man who flushed his underpants down the gent's loo and blocked the main sewer outside and bunged up the whole of the Coombes.
Cath: Peter enjoyed that one (not) as he had to unbung everything and dig out the underpants.
Cath: and the person who stole the Portmeirion vase from the ladies restroom.
Cath: having first tipped out all the lavender seeds wot were in it at the time.
Cath: funny how you remember all the arseholes.
Cath: but we do get some lovely people too!

..has been written by commentators who have been asked to retrospectively assess their (mostly) gung-ho support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Anybody hoping for mea culpas of the "we were wrong and here's why" variety will be largely disappointed. As Glenn Greenwald explains here, many of the commentators chose to deploy variants of the "right idea, lousy execution" explanation, which rather neatly sidesteps any discussion of whether the idea of invading Iraq was a Really Bad Idea to begin with. The only commentator who appears to have any conception of what should happen now is Timothy Noah, who had this to say:

A larger question, though: Why should you waste your time, at this late date, ingesting the opinions of people who were wrong about Iraq? Wouldn't you benefit more from considering the views of people who were right? Five years after this terrible war began, it remains true that respectable mainstream discussion about its lessons is nearly exclusively confined to people who supported the war, even though that same mainstream acknowledges, for the most part, that the war was a mistake. That's true of Slate's symposium, and it was true of a similar symposium that appeared March 16 on the New York Times' op-ed pages. The people who opposed U.S. entry into the Iraq war, it would appear, are insufficiently "serious" to explain why they were right.

However, I found the most compelling piece of verbiage in this section to be this well-constructed home truth by commenter Arlington in the discussion forums at Slate:

Your column points out an American tendency with which we need to come to grips. We love war. We say we go to war reluctantly. We say we grieve the sacrifice of the dead and wounded, both ours and theirs. We say all sorts of things to make ourselves look like peace-loving people who only use military force as a last resort.
It's all a pack of lies. Since nobody else is fooled, we're only lying to ourselves.
We maintain a huge war machine, far more powerful than we need to defend ourselves against attack. Not that anyone would attack us in the first place, since they know we'd nuke them into oblivion. If not to defend ourselves, our military is for something else. It's about time we admitted the real reason we keep so many people under arms and provide them with so many powerful and expensive weapons.
The Iraq war finally exposes the truth. We use military power as a substitute for economic and diplomatic power. As the dollar slips in comparison to the Euro, and our diplomatic stature shrinks by the minute, we have no choice but to employ guns and bombs to get our way. Our political leadership is a collection of people who think they're being futuristic and forward-looking by updating the domino theory and dressing it up with visions of a new empire.
Perhaps that will be the legacy of the Bush administration, to prove, once and for all, that not every problem is solved by killing people. Maybe we can regain some of the humanistic optimisim we had when we conceived of ideas like the Marshall Plan and the Peace Corps. Maybe we can do better things in the world than invading and occupying small, depressed nations and "saving" them by killing large numbers of their citizens.
If we can't stop loving war, let's at least learn to keep it in its place. If we have to make war on little countries, let's at least get them back on their feet after we've had our fun with them. Let's not let every dollar be diverted from civic infrastructure, science, and social programs to buy bombs.

That comment neatly summarizes many of my opinions about the underlying pathology that led the USA to blithely occupy a manufactured foreign country and expect a positive medium-term outcome. As Frank Zappa once observed, the US does not have a national defense - it has a national offense. It is way past time for a debate about how the USA appears to have decided that, to use an old phrase, guns are more important than butter.

Link: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/3/18/81127/6599/1007/479035

When I was growing up in the UK in the 1960's, the country was steadily living beyond its means. Although we rapidly exited the Empire business in the late 1950's and early 60's, we still had long-range defence committments as far East as Singapore, and the country had never really recovered from being beaten and stretched every which way in World War II. The result was that eventually our deficit spending led to a run on the pound, devaluation, and a period of drift that was only stopped by the election of Margaret Thatcher.
Bonddad has another posting that shows the true extent of US indebtedness to the rest of the world right now. The US has also been living beyond its means, and the amount of money owed to the rest of the world is approaching staggering levels. One thing I learned many years ago is that although countries do not go bankrupt in any conventional sense, they can still be reduced to penurious ineffectiveness when nobody wants to buy your debt. Sooner or later people stop lending you money because they don't believe they will ever get it back. The Bear Stearns collapse occurred partly because no other businesses wanted to buy or hold its debt and securities. Right now the Federal Reserve is struggling to stabilize the marketplace for asset-backed securities, because of a lack of confidence in the value of those securities. The really scary issue to contemplate is what happens if other countries lose faith in the USA. If that happens, the Federal Reserve will cease to be effective; the "full faith and credit of the United States" will cease to have any credibility.
The other interesting aspect to the charts in Bonddad's posting is how the expansion of debt has mostly occurred under Republican presidents (Reagan, Bush I and now Bush II). Yet the meme "tax and spend Democrats" still has legs. Wake up folks! It's Red Ink Republicans!
UPDATE - This graph shows the recent trend in the US National Debt. Notable is that most of the recent escalation in debt levels has occurred when the Republicans controlled the White House. Interesting attempts in the comments to blame this all on the Democrats...denial is a powerful thing...
UPDATE 2 - A more detailed analysis of the recent trends in the National Debt, with some other links for more analysis. Here is the Wikipedia overview of the US National Debt landscape.

I keep finding profiles on dating sites where the person includes an IM (Instant Messenger) ID as part of the profile text.
However, when I then attempt to contact them via the IM channel, I get the message that my profile has been rejected.
Note to the people who do this: you need to get your ideas straight about IM encounters. If you include an IM id on your profile, you can expect people to try to contact you via the IM route, since many dating sites have poor-quality email and chat capability. If you want to check out somebody's profile before you consent to an IM encounter, then don't give out your IM ID at all. You can always check out the profile, then send it in an email if you like the person and want to talk to them.
Placing your IM id on the profile and then refusing to chat via the IM route is a sure-fire way to ensure that you will have a negative result from anybody who manages encounters via IM. To re-use an old saying, you only have one chance to make a good first impression, and pissing me off by submitting a Yahoo ID and then refusing to chat creates a really bad first impression...

Link: http://bonddad.blogspot.com/2008/03/on-bear-stearns-situation.html

This blog post by Bonddad explains some of the background to the rapid collapse of Bear Stearns, which in a matter of weeks has lurched from being one of the biggest investment banks in the USA to being sold yesterday at the fire-sale price of $2 a share to JP Morgan, with the Federal Reserve effectively underwriting a large part of Bear Stearns' asset pool to allow JP Morgan to go ahead with the sale.
This intervention by the Federal Reserve demonstrates the current level of danger in the US financial sector. The property price collapse, and the subsequent effect on the mortgage-backed securities market, is causing the dreaded "ripple effect" in financial markets. Anybody who tries to act as a cheerleader in the current state of the marketplace should either be asked what they have been smoking, or asked if they want to buy a bridge in New York...
UPDATE - The "ripple effect" has already happened - the firesale of Bear Stearns has caused downturns in other world markets.

Link: http://bullshitbingo.net

...you too can re-use all of those vacuous leadership and project management slogans...

...has ignited a firestorm inside and outside Oklahoma. The video of her speech was initially posted on YouTube, and rapidly caused a widespread wave of condemnation. Here is the transcript of her speech:

The homosexual agenda [Loud snap] is destroying this nation. OK? It's just a fact. [Volume increases] Not everybody's lifestyle is equal, just like not all religions are equal.
You know, the very fact that I'm talking to you like this here today, puts me in jeopardy. OK? Uh and I'm not anti, I'm not gay-bashing, but according to God's word that is not the right kind of lifestyle, it has deadly consequences for those people involved in it, they have more suicides, uh and they're more discouraged, there's more illness, their uh lifespans are shorter, you know?
It's, it's, it's not a lifestyle that is good for this nation.
'Matter of fact, studies show, that no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted more than, you know, a few decades.
So it's the death knell of this country.
I honestly think it's the biggest threat even, that our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam, which I think is a big threat. OK?
Because what's happening now, they're going after er uh in schools - two year-olds!
You know why they're trying to get early childhood education? They want to get our young children into the government schools so they can indoctrinate them! I taught school for close to twenty years and we're not teaching facts and knowledge anymore folks, we're teaching indoctrination. OK?
And they're going after our young children, as young as two years of age, to try to teach them that the homosexual lifestyle is the acceptable lifestyle.
You know, gays are infiltrating city councils.
Do you know? Eureka Springs [Arkansas], anybody been there, for the [Great] Passion Play? [A "Creation Truth" production] OK, have you heard that the city council of Eureka Springs is now controlled by gays? OK?
There are some others. Uh, Pittsburgh, Pa.; Tacoma, Md.; Kensington, Md.; in Vermont, Oregon, West Palm Beach, Fla. and a lot of other places in Florida.
What's happening? And they are winning elections. One of the things I deal with in our legislature, I tried to introduce a bill last year, that would notify parents, uh schools had to let parents know what clubs their students were involved in.
And the reason I did that bill, primarily, was this, we had the Gay-Straight Alliance coming into our schools.
Kids are getting involved in these groups, their lives are being ruined, their parents don't know about it. So I introduced a bill that said you have to notify all clubs, and things. And one of my colleagues said, "Well, you know we don't have a gay problem in my community, so that's why I voted against that bill."
Well you know what? To me that is so dumb. If you've got cancer or something in your little toe, do you say, Well you know I’m just gonna forget about it, 'cause the rest of you's fine?
It spreads! OK?
And this, this stuff is deadly, and it's spreading and it will destroy uh our young people, it will destroy this nation.

The unfortunate thing about a lot of the reactions to Rep. Kern's speech is that they focusssed on calling her words "hate speech". While the sentiments expressed are confused, uninformed and bigoted, the danger of labelling disagreeable words as "hate speech" is that such a statement raises the emotional temperature of any debate and distracts from the need to comprehensively dismantle the speech to show that it is lacking in any cogency or intelligence. The emotional response from many activists of sending offensive emails to Rep. Kern also does not help since it allows her to play the martyr (and we know from watching organized religion over many hundreds of years that there is very little in life that is more appealing to a hard-core monotheist than the prospect of public martyrdom, as they fight the good fight against "evil" and "decadence").
By any standards, the speech (if you can call it that) is long on fear-driven rhetoric and very short on anything comprising a coherent argument. It reads like a bar-room drunk poking somebody in the chest as he rails against imaginary evils. I could take it apart and reduce it to little pieces, but I do not have the time right now.
Rep. Kern issued a statement recently in response to the expressions of outrage. Rather predictably, the statement essentially focuses on what she says is her right to make statements, hiding by implication behind the 1st Amendment. She also claims that she is correct (surprise surprise). In other words, petulantly unrepentant.
The more interesting aspect of this event is that Rep. Kern apparently obtained a standing ovation from her party's state caucus after reading some of the responses. I have no doubt that she focussed on cherry-picking the more vituperative and threatening responses. However, it is notable that not a single leading elected representative in OKC or the state of Oklahoma has stepped up to dismantle the speech and assert its intellectual bankruptcy. I was therefore moved to send this email to the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce this morning:

By now you must surely be aware of the speech made by State Rep. Sally Kern, where, among other statements, she made the statement that "homosexuality is a bigger threat to our nation than terrorism or Islam". Rep. Kern's response to criticism of her speech ignores the hyperbolic falsehood of that statement in favour of a sniffy defense of her right to free speech, and more hand-waving about "homesexual activists". Both her speech and response are almost totally devoid of any logical argument in favour of her position. In short, her arguments are intellectually risible.
It seems that the Oklahoma State Legislature is currently more interested in investigating alleged death threats against Rep. Kern than it is in pointing out that (a) her remarks have no basis in fact (b) are directly in conflict with two of the goals of the Great Oklahoma City Chamber goals, as published on your web site:

GOALS
> To create a business climate that attracts new businesses and enhances growth and expansion opportunities for existing businesses.
> To create a community with an irresistible quality of life.
> To create value-added membership opportunities and benefits.

"Irresistible quality of life" is not enhanced by a state legislator making inflammatory and bigoted remarks, and by local and state leaders sitting on their hands instead of pointing this out.
Most innovative businesses value creativity and diversity in their workforces. Rep. Kern's remarks certainly do not foster diversity, and most creative people would run a mile from the sort of opinions and thinking explicitly expressed by Rep. Kern.

Right now, the passive acquiescence of the Oklahoma State Legislature is convincing me that Oklahoma City and the state of Oklahoma does not have a proper understanding of the word "inclusive" when it comes to attracting businesses or people to relocate to or spend money in the state.
My personal philosophy is that if a state or community wishes to underwrite ideology in the pursuit of commerce, whether that is active or passive underwriting, I reserve the right to invoke my own personal ideology in buying decisions when considering whether to buy products and services created by that state or community. For example, I made the decision some time ago to not visit the city of Kanab, UT after the local council passed a "Natural Family Resolution" that made it clear that for them, religiously-based ideology was more important than creating an inclusive business and societal climate.
Accordingly, I am informing you that since Oklahoma's leaders appear to be passively accepting these sort of retrograde views, I intend to ensure that none of my future discretionary spending goes to any business located in Oklahoma City or the state of Oklahoma. I may modify that policy if I see evidence that business and political leaders in Oklahoma City or the state of Oklahoma accept that Rep. Kern's remarks are deeply antithetical to the norms of an inclusive, fair society, and therefore need to be disavowed as not representing the opinions of either Oklahoma or its leaders.

My rule is that if cities or organizations engage in bigoted ideology, I will include ideology in buying decisions. I am currently declining to visit Kanab UT after they passed their "Natural Family Resolution" in 2006. Whether my boycott has any impact is doubtful, but that city passed a resolution that suggested that the family model they approved of was one from the Middle Ages, so I decided to avoid the town, which does impact me since canard pusher fly-ins are held there.